


Leave Me To Drown In Your Dust

by catteo



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: F/M, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-12
Updated: 2013-06-12
Packaged: 2017-12-14 18:30:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/840000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catteo/pseuds/catteo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post 1x10 <i>Endless Forms Most Beautiful</i>. Hopefully very AU once the show returns after this evil year long hiatus.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Leave Me To Drown In Your Dust

They find Kira at 4.16 on a freezing Monday afternoon in February. The setting sun knifes across the sky in vivid slashes of crimson and red. Sarah thinks that perhaps it might be beautiful, but there’s a hollow ache in her chest and as she blinks everything turns to muted greys and ochres, the colour of ashes and dust. The bitter taste of her own failure is metal and acid on her tongue. Paul’s hand on her shoulder is nothing but weight tethering her to the ground, his words incomprehensible in her ears.

 

_Sarah. Sarah. Sarahsarahsarah_.

 

The word ceases to have any meaning for her. She’s nothing more than one of many now, lacking the only thing that made her unique. Made her special.

 

The world shrinks to the patch of earth at her feet; nothing but cracked concrete and twisted steel She can see a single dandelion near Kira’s outstretched hand, proof of survival against all the odds, but Sarah realises that this time there will be no second chances and no miracle salvation at the eleventh hour. She knows that this is what she deserves for her carelessness and misplaced defiance, a tiny body colder than ice and a heart that no longer knows how to beat. Brown curls spill haphazardly across the icy ground and all she can think is that Kira should be wearing a coat. 

 

She drops to her knees and slowly unwinds the scarf from her own neck, holds Kira close and wraps it gently around pale skin. She can feel the wind lace icy fingers under the loops and knots that she ties with infinite care, stealing away the only thing she has left to offer. She dimly registers Paul’s presence at her side, but he’s as insubstantial as mist and she doesn’t even notice his tears as he brushes a hand across Kira’s forehead. Sarah closes her eyes at the familiarity of the motion, brushes her lips to Kira’s forehead and lets go.

 

She only fucks him with the lights off. Refuses to look at him despite the fact that he’s moaning her name over and over. Sarah stares at a pale yellow smudge on the wall next to the bed and wonders why she can never get rid of the stains. There’s a bandage wrapped around her wrist and a blood-soaked towel in the sink and something must be wrong because nothing hurts and she’s sure that it should. 

 

Sarah wraps her hand around his cock, pumps her fist and counts to ten in her head, then sinks down onto him. And she considers it a final betrayal that her nipples harden and her cunt throbs and Paul whispers her name as she comes. The half-moons of her bitten-down fingernails leave grooves in his arms and her fingers itch to pick up a blade and carve deep into unblemished skin. To see if there’s another version lying just beneath the surface.

 

Paul never seems to be able to find the words to tell her that he’s sorry. But she can feel it. He draws his apologies on her skin with his tongue; paints his constant grief down her spine with the touch of his hands. She doesn’t tell him to stop; just stands under water almost too hot to bear and scrubs herself clean of his regrets. Of hers.

 

The world moves on and some days she thinks that maybe she’s forgotten how much she hurts. But then she finds herself standing in Beth’s house, in Beth’s bathroom, at Beth’s vanity. With Beth’s pills. And she thinks that maybe it could be this easy. That perhaps she could just fade away into someone else’s existence. That she knows exactly how Beth felt trapped in this endless lie, and that maybe the only way out is the one staring her in the face.

 

But suddenly it’s twelve hours later and the pills are gone (with bile and blood and bitter recriminations) and he’s standing at the door with his bags packed and she realises that Beth never had this. Never had him. And for a moment she can almost touch it, the fear that lights up the edges of her vision and makes her stumble towards him. For long moments she thinks that she’s forgotten how to breathe, a kaleidoscope of emotions suddenly assaulting all her carefully constructed defences, but she somehow drags air past the sorrow howling in her chest and _remembers_. 

 

It’s a slow awakening and every day there’s a six-year old girl on the street with curly dark hair and laughing eyes and Sarah thinks that she might break all over again. But he takes her hand and pulls her home and she realises that it’s just her ghosts dancing in the twilight.

 

She slowly undresses with the lights on, peels off her own clothes until there’s nothing but skin and raw truth. He reaches out and traces the scars on her skin with soft fingers, wipes her salt-stained face with gentle hands. She brands him as hers with her teeth at his shoulder and claims his name with her mouth. Starts again.


End file.
